Thursday, June 15, 2006

Every once in a while a Web gem comes along for the small business startup company on a tight budget, with very little capital, time, and a little talent.

Microsoft just recently released Microsoft Office Live Beta

In a Internet business story that almost sounds too good to be true, and I have to admit that I was extremely skeptical to begin with; Microsoft Office Live is an online program that has three levels of affordability and tools available. Live Basics, Live Collaboration, and Live Essentials. All three of these products are free during beta. Live Basic will continue to be totally free after the beta period. The other two products are set to be $29.95/month.

Free: your own domain name. This domain name is owned by you exclusively. You register it with a company Microsoft uses for domain name registration. The registration is free for as long as you have the free account with Microsoft. If you choose to decide to move it to another domain name registrar you have to wait 60 days after the day you signed up with Microsoft.

Website design tools. Using Internet Explorer, a person can use various website templates, color schemes, and layout designs to build a website. An unlimited amount of Web pages are allowed.

For an example of something that you can do with these Microsoft products visit www.myhotdots.com website domain registered and published using Microsoft Live Basic. Businesses have a clean slate for any website they put together and not quite full control over all the html code within the free version.

Microsoft Also Offers: Live Collaboration and Live Essentials

Collaboration allows business groups within a company to share information in collaborative environments with multiple websites, "among internal employees and external customers, suppliers, and vendors," and online business tools. Essentials offers more features than Live Basic with additional online business tools and 50 e-mail accounts that can be used with Microsoft Outlook. Basic only allows the email to be read and processed through the online email account reading of the email messages. Live Collaboration and Live Essentials are free during the beta period and are $29.95/month thereafter.

So What's The Sales, Marketing, And Advertising Catch?

Website work takes time, creative copywriting, marketing, advertising, and sales concepts must be continually evaluated and site maintenance dealt with on a regular basis, SEO - Search Engine Optimization of the web pages, and focusing on using the right words for your target audiences. More than likely you know your business inside and out; and the words you use are intuitive to your everyday speech and communications with management and employees. However, on a website that is to be your main business reach to your customers and the rest of the world, you need to communicate with the keywords your customers use. This takes a concerted effort to improve the website design and reach your customer base through queries on the search engines.